Thoughts on drawing

Maybe I should talk a little about this drawing thing since it seems like some people are interested. Most of my drawing experience has been in the last year using Colors on the Nintendo DS. Before about a year ago, I had probably drawn about 20 or 30 pictures in my whole life not counting stick figures and flow charts. :) But I guess it depends on what you count as drawing. At work, I program graphics for video games. I think it is sometimes very similar to drawing, but instead of a brush, I use equations. In order to write these equations, I have to think visually, in a way that artists probably think, but I translate that into the physics of light. I'm not even sure how most artists think. I just know that when I sit down to draw, if I don't know what to do, I think about the physics. What would the computer do? That is the sad truth behind my "art" skills. :)

Here is a screenshot of one of the games I have worked on. This is a screenshot from Iron Man for Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.

If you are looking to learn about this stuff, pick up some computer graphics books and maybe go to the Siggraph conference. That's how I learned.

I'm not all equations though. A few years back I asked an artist at work how I could learn to draw. He recommended a book called "Drawing on the Right side of the Brain". I read the first bit of that and did some of the exercises. It's a good book, but mostly what I got out of it is one basic idea. When you look at something, your brain processes it into symbols. People who can't draw will draw those symbols instead of the light that they are seeing. If you want to make a sweet realistic looking picture, you need to draw what you really see instead of what you think you see. The way I do that is by squinting until I can barely recognize what I'm looking at. Then I am able to see the light that needs to be drawn. I highly recommend that book if you're trying to learn to draw.